James Dean, Alliance Consultants

How long have you been established?We have only been going as a company since December 2009, but between us we have been involved in the telecoms industry for 25 years.

Where are you based?We are based in Southampton.

What networks do you connect?Vodafone, Orange and O2. We are fairly evenly split in terms of connections. We are an O2 ‘approved’ iPhone stockist through MoCo and connect through Anglia for Orange and Vodafone.

What is your typical customer profile?Definitely SME. We have customers with as many as 110 handsets down to one man bands.

How do you look after customers?We have always thought that the best way of looking after customers is to have one point of contact. We have moved away from the call centre model. The person who initially deals with the customer follows it through because they know everything about that account.

Do you offer any other services apart from mobile?We also provide fixed line and IT support as well. We started offering fixed line fairly soon after we set up the company. We try to get our mobile customers signed up to fixed line as well. If we don’t offer those services, someone else will.What are your best selling products?We sell a lot of iPhones, and since the new one launched we have been inundated with requests. We also do a lot of BlackBerry and have partnered with an IT company to do BES.What makes you different from other dealers? Our customers are loyal to us because of the service we offer. There are no call centres and they have a direct line to us. If one of our customers has a problem they know they will get an answer quickly. We are also an approved supplier for the London 2010 Olympics after going through a lengthy process, and we will be going through the tender process for other contracts as well. We recently took part in a 20 mile charity bike ride to raise money for a firefighters charity. We negotiated with Natwest and they agreed to double our target of £1,500 if we hit it, and we did.